Can non-american copyright holders simply file DMCA claims like that? That puts American site owners at a strong disadvantage if someone registers a complaint from a country that has no similar cease-and-desist mechanism.

For example in this case, claimant seems to be the one who really offended copyright law, but if India has no DMCA equivalent, all the defendants can do is try to undo the effect of the false claim. Any and all damage of the interruption is at their expense.

AFAIK, he can make a DMCA claim, sure. But to counter it, the original site just needs to send a counter claim, saying it isn’t true. There’s a proper formal way, I believe. At any rate, once the DMCA’s countered, he has no recourse except to actually take them to court for the supposed copyright violation, and they don’t have to take it down in the meantime. Even if he’s dumb and spendthrift enough to actually try court.

“Who else would hire Online Reputation Manager in order to pull articles directly relating to Anil Potti’s fabricated results?”
What evidence is there that an Online Reputation Manager involved in this? Stories involving Anil Potti and Online Reputation Managers date from early 2011. Generally what they do is a variety of googling bombing to try and move negative stories down the search engine results and positive and neutral stories up.

Scapegoating is a very common feature of scientific misconduct, I don’t think Anil Potti can avoid a considerable level of responsibility for what wrong – but the wide range of authors on the papers and the diverse areas where things went wrong – from statistics to bioinformatics – it beggars belief that Potti was solely responsible for all those outputs.

This is not the first time Retraction Watch has been facilitating ugly and unhelpful scapegoating.

I wrote to Cambridge University (or Dowling College to be specific ) pointing out a few of the peculiarities of this correspondence and asking if it was genuine. I have received no reply.

While I am certain this correspondence – leaked exclusively to Retraction Watch – is fraudulent (except for one letter), even in the unlikely circumstances it was genuine it was certainly inappropriate. If Cambridge University wanted to make an official statement that they thought could have been helpful they were certainly welcome to, but not unofficial leaking of selected documents from personal files by unknown persons.

The scenario I think played out here is the post-doc concerned threatened to reveal that misconduct in the lab was more widespread and in response the senior figures at the uni decided to nuke him. In the same case here, what went wrong at Duke probably points to wider failings, using Retraction Watch to scapegoat one person seems to be the modern playbook when dealing with cases of bad science practice.

I don’t blame RW for being annoyed about getting a takedown notice and having to spend an hour or so file a counter-claim and having to wait a week or so for the posts to be restored. But they have gone on record dropping strong hints that it was Potti who was responsible – when in my view they should not have done – and in doing so they crossed line and joined in scapegoating.